On a new system that did not yet have a jdk intalled, I emerged sun-jdk. When I ran java-config --list-available-vms, I got the response, No Java installation found. The only way I could get it to work was to do the following: cp /etc/env.d/java/20sun-jdk-1.4.0 /etc/env.d/20java Then everything worked as described in the online documentation.
Fixed.